Tara Donovan: Transforming the Ordinary

[caption id="attachment_39359" align="alignnone" width="600"] Tara Donovan (American, born 1969) Untitled, 2015, Slinkys®, Overall dimensions variable. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery © Tara Donovan[/caption]

By Dawn Watson

Tara Donovan tends to see things in a different light than the rest of us.

Take the Slinky, for example. Practically anyone who’s watched television in the past 70 years can sing about the popular toy’s attributes, thanks to the song recognized as the longest-running jingle in advertising history. But Ms. Donovan sees the pre-compressed spring as much more than a “marvelous thing … that walks down stairs, alone and in pairs.” To her, the “wonderful toy” is a key sculptural component.

[caption id="attachment_39360" align="alignnone" width="300"] Tara Donovan (American, born 1969) Untitled, 2015, Monoprint, 57 x 97 inches. Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Parrish Art Museum Collector's Circle, and Sherry Brous and Douglas Oliver. Photograph by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery. © 2015 Tara Donovan, courtesy Pace Gallery.[/caption]

“The Slinky is certainly an iconic toy that I and countless others played with as children (and as adults),” the Brooklyn-based artist says. But there’s more to it than that, she adds. “As with much of my work, I wanted to consider the Slinky as a material outside of its inscribed function.”

Transforming prosaic items into artistic wonders is Ms. Donovan’s specialty. For her upcoming exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, she’s repurposed the coiled metal material—as she has other familiar objects, such as adhesive tape, Styrofoam cups, paper plates, drinking straws, tar paper and toothpicks—to create large-scale biomorphic sculpture and other works of art.

With the exception of a single monoprint in the “Platform: Tara Donovan” exhibit, opening July 4 and running through October 12, the “site-responsive” work was created specifically for the Parrish, she reports. The Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, which Ms. Donovan says is an excellent example of the integration of architecture and landscape, inspired her to develop the pieces “in order to tease out structural possibilities.”

“When I am looking at materials, I always seek certain physical traits that can somehow be activated outside of the material or object itself. The expanding and contracting volume of a Slinky was one of the factors I sought to exploit in thinking about the idea of drawing in space,” she says. “The reflectivity of the metal is also important as means for the work to respond to the lighting conditions of the galleries.”

The contemporary artist, who fellow creator and local creative icon Chuck Close has called “truly innovative,” has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the inaugural 2005 Calder Foundation Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant, and has shown in the Whitney Biennial and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among other legendary institutions. She first met Parrish Director Terrie Sultan when she was an undergraduate student at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., where Ms. Sultan was a curator at the time, back in the late 1980s. The two have remained friends since, she says. Last year, Ms. Sultan asked her to show at the Parrish.

Once Ms. Donovan, who has visited the area many times, identified how the work could be realized at the Water Mill museum, she manufactured it at her studio and began to tailor its volume and scale to the particulars of the designated spaces there. The production phase of the sculpture and wall works began in the studio this past fall, the artist reports. The print series was produced during winter and early spring.

At the Parrish, the products of her contextual work will be a massive free-standing structure, wall relief and monoprint that will fill the museum space, undulating over the gallery walls and inhabiting the exhibition area with an almost animate presence. The works will physically claim territory throughout the museum— from the lobby to the permanent collection galleries— creating visual surprises all around, according to the catalogue for this fourth installation of a “Platform” series show.

Each of the pieces represents a different exploration of the material’s potential, according to Donovan. In one project, the Slinkys are deconstructed and refashioned in such way that they project two-dimensionally along the flat surface of a wall in meandering and layered patterns that can be expanded or contracted to any given spatial conditions. The other project is a free-standing sculpture in which the spreading coils of the Slinkys are exploited in such a way that suggests an evolving dispersion of material in space (“Think of smoke unfurling in the air, as an example,” she says.).

Additionally, a series of prints were created in tandem with an ongoing investigation of Slinkys as a sculptural material. Using the same method of construction as the wall works, matrices of Slinkys are produced and inked using an airbrush, she says. Also, an edition of relief prints were made from each unique matrix in a hydraulic press, and a series of monoprint “negatives” (one of which is included in the Parrish exhibition) were also created using the Slinky matrix as a stencil on top of a steel plate, which is then airbrushed with ink and printed after the matrix is removed, according to the artist.

The result, Donovan hopes, is something art aficionados will want to come out to see. Or, simply put as the song says, “fun for a girl or a boy.”